Sea urchin is moving up from the back roe.
A delicacy long-prized in other areas of the globe, it’s now popping up
on more and more menus in New York City, in everything from sandwiches
to pizza.
The prized part of the spiny creatures are the gonads, called uni in
Japan, which are usually eaten raw or lightly cooked in dishes. They’re
yellowish in color and have a rich buttery texture and briny, floral
taste.
And now is the perfect time to enjoy uni.
“The sea urchins spawn in late summer and early fall, so the flavor can
be a bit off,” says Adam Geringer-Dunn, the co-owner and chef of
Greenpoint Fish & Lobster, of the uni he sources from Massachusetts.
“In the winter, they tend to be plumper and better.”
Ken Oringer, who owns Toro in Chelsea, says that when he opened Copa in
Boston five years ago, it was difficult to get customers to try a pasta
carbonara with uni. Now, it’s the restaurant’s top-selling dish.
“Times have changed a lot,” Oringer says. “People realized the quality
of uni they are getting from Maine and California is phenomenal. They
probably had bad uni experiences back in the day, but now the quality is
amazing. It’s very mild and very sweet.”
Greenpoint Fish & Lobster sells live uni in its fish market as well
as freshly prepared in the restaurant. Geringer-Dunn and his staff give
customers quick tutorials on how to prep the pods at home.
“It’s the lure of the exotic,” says Geringer-Dunn. “We’ve gotten so
away from seeing food in the original form, that it’s appealing to
adventurous home cooks to experience eating something out of its shell.”
Customers are also excited they can take it home for $3 per sea urchin.
Most experience uni at high-end sushi bars, but it’s getting easier for
restaurants like Greenpoint Fish & Lobster to source the pods live.
Here’s where to get uni around the city, in dishes from pasta to panini.
Live sea urchin
(Greenpoint Fish & Lobster, 114 Nassau Ave., Brooklyn; greenpointfish.com)
This combination seafood market and eat-in dining room sells live sea
urchin sustainably sourced from Massachusetts. You can order it freshly
prepared in the dining room ($7) or buy the live urchins and have staff
show you how to prepare them at home ($3 each).
To pick a good sea urchin at a market, Geringer-Dunn recommends lifting
them — fresh urchin will be heavy with liquid inside. Also examine the
outside; if they’ve been handled well, the spines won’t be broken and
damaged.
For prepping, you’ll need gloves and a strong pair of scissors to enter
the urchin through the mouth then cut an opening in the top to create a
bowl out of the shell. Inside, you’ll find five yellow-orange edible
lobes. Rinse them off, and serve them inside the shell.
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Uni panini
(Toro, 85 10th Ave., Chelsea; toronyc.com)
Chef Oringer is such a fan of sea urchin that he named one of his
restaurants Uni in Boston. At Toro, the New York outpost of his and chef
Jamie Bissonnette’s Boston tapas restaurant, the ingredient makes an
appearance on the menu in the Bocadillo de Erizos ($13), a grilled
panini-style sandwich with miso butter and mustard seeds.
“Lemon and butter go perfectly with sea urchin,” Oringer says. “In
Europe, that’s what they serve it with. The pickled mustard seeds give
it some tang, and there are some chives for an herbaceous onion note.
It’s gooey and delicious and just warmed on the inside, and crunchy and
buttery on the outside of the sandwich.”
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Uni fried rice
(Bunker Vietnamese, 46-63 Metropolitan Ave., Ridgewood; bunkervietnamese.com)
At this Vietnamese spot in Queens, a reoccurring special — when the
restaurant gets good sea urchin in — is the uni fried rice ($33). Chef
Jimmy Tu makes a curry fried rice with large chunks of fresh crab,
pineapple, cashews, tomatoes, mushrooms, Thai basil and dried shrimp,
and at the end gently blends in the uni so it doesn’t overcook.
“The uni has a richness that really complements the fresh crab and pineapple,” Tu says.
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Urchin pizza
(Prova, 184 8th Ave., Chelsea; provanyc.com)
At this new pizza spot, partner Maurizio de Rosa — who’s also behind
Sushi Nakazawa in the West Village — uses his seafood connections to
source high quality uni for the Urcina Pizza ($29) created by chef
Pasquale Cozzolino.
Since the pizzas are cooked in an extremely hot wood-burning oven for
about 90 seconds, Cozzolino first tops the pizza dough with crushed ice
before putting on pecorino cheese and putting it in the oven. This
presses down the center of the dough the same way tomato sauce would.
And when it comes out of the oven and is ready to be topped with uni
pieces, a squid ink, tomato sauce and caper leaves, the surface is
hydrated — and not so hot that it scorches the delicate toppings.
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Uni tasting menu
(Saikai, 24 Greenwich Ave., West Village; saikainyc.com)
This upscale izakaya always has a few uni dishes on the menu, but for
January, it’s hosting a special six-course sea urchin tasting menu ($70
with wine pairings, palate cleanser and ice cream). Chefs Xaio Lin and
Wing Cheng — who both spent years working at Masa in the Time Warner
Center — collaborated on the menu, which features dishes like jumbo
shrimp with uni sauce; uni and bay scallops au gratin; and Miyazaki
Wagyu beef topped with uni. But the visual show stopper is the
miso-smoked uni sashimi, served in a glass vessel with a lid that the
diner removes to release the fragrant smoke.
Uni pasta
(All’onda, 22 E. 13th St., Greenwich Village; allondanyc.com)
Bucatini ($32) — a play on an American carbonara pasta, which is made
with smoky bacon — has become the signature dish at this
Japanese-influenced Venetian restaurant. In chef Chris Jaeckle’s
creation, he cold smokes uni before adding it to this egg-based sauce.
“Egg on egg, like caviar and sea urchin or caviar and eggs, is a
classic combination in French, Italian and Japanese cooking,” Jaeckle
says the dish, which he estimates the spot sells 25 to 40 of every day.
“When people told me that they hated sea urchin but loved this dish, or
that they’d try uni someplace else now, I realized I had something on my
hands that was special.”
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